Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
May 2002
Document Type
Article
Abstract
The cover of Willa Cather's Southern Connections reproduces one square of what is Known as the Robinson-Cather quilt, an image that testifies to a communal-and female-artistic tradition in which Cather's Back Creek, Virginia, kinswomen participated and with which her often heroic literary fictions seem to have little relation. Ann Romines participates in a quilting process of her own, piecing together seventeen revised essays from the seventh of a series of international conferences on Willa Cather held in 1997. Both conference and volume recontextualize a writer so often seen as Nebraskan or Western within a Southern matrix, asking Cather's readers to view her in a web of Southern writers, dilemmas, and discourses so that we might begin to re-imagine our narratives about her career and her central texts. How, asks Judith Fetterley, might our official stories of Cather change as a result?
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2002). Published by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Copyright © 2000 Center for Great Plains Studies. Used by permission.